Pawns Move

Comrade Col. Xin Zhu, obese spy and head of the Expedition Agency within
the Sixth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security, suspects there is a C.I.A.
mole burrowing into Chinas secrets. But he is under threat from Wu
Liang and his ally, Yang Qing-Nian, of the Supervision and Liaison Committee,
an offshoot of the Central Committees Political and Legislative Affairs
Committee. Zhu believes Zhang Guo of the Supreme Peoples Procuratorate
is on his side, probably, but he is less sure of the veteran schemer Comrade
Lt. Gen. Sun Bingjun.

If this plethora of Chinese names and Chinese bureaucracies is a little daunting,
thats exactly the intention of Olen Steinhauer, a spy novelist who
refuses to make it easy for his readers, but rewards them richly in the end.
Not for Steinhauer the simple, linear march of the traditional thriller.
Rather, he drops the reader (and his characters) into situations of the most
mind-bending complexity and forces them to work things out for themselves.

Not since John le Carré has a writer so vividly evoked the multilayered,
multifaceted, deeply paranoid world of espionage, in which identities and
allegiances are malleable and ever shifting, the mirrors of loyalty and betrayal
reflecting one another to infinity. In this intensely clever, sometimes baffling
book, its never quite clear who is manipulating whom, and which side
is up.

In his earlier novels The Tourist and The Nearest Exit,
Steinhauer introduced the Department of Tourism, a small, highly trained,
perfectly ruthless black-ops cell within the C.I.A. responsible for doing
the agencys dirtiest work. At the start of An American Spy,
Xin Zhu has sent the Tourists packing by luring some 33 of them to their
deaths in a coordinated global hit. Out for revenge, the former head of the
department, Alan Drummond, is determined to recruit Milo Weaver, one of the
few surviving Tourists and the dour, damaged hero of Steinhauers two
previous books.

But Weaver is trying to give it all up  the drink, the cigarettes,
the spying, the lying  to spend time with an adored daughter (who is
not biologically his), restore a marriage (undermined by deceit) and recover
from the latest attempt to kill him (a bullet wound that has required the
removal of part of his intestines). When Drummond disappears and then
Milos family also vanishes, he is tricked back into the game, to his
own annoyance. You forgot that no one is above deception, he
admonishes himself. You became as ­naïve as all the other
civilians.

Behind the distortions lie multiple self-deceptions, the personal evasions
that muddy every action. Even the most powerful are fallible. Zhu believes
his annihilation of the Department of Tourism is righteous vengeance for
the death of his only son, preferring not to face the guilty truth that his
young new wife, feeding him dumplings in their apartment high above Beijing,
was formerly his daughter-in-law. Weaver can beat a man to pulp in an airport
washroom as effectively as the next spy, but hes no James Bond: he
forgets to put salt in his cooking; he glumly chews nicotine gum; he has
nightmares in which he fails to protect his daughter from a gang of thugs.
The fat Chinese spy is playing Weaver, and being played himself, because
the spies are themselves pawns of the spymasters in Washington and Beijing.
Its extremely messy, Zhu says, with understatement.

Steinhauer is more interested in twists of plot than turns of phrase, but
the very bluntness of his novels writing adds to its impact. His women
have less psychological depth: the wives of Drummond and Weaver are all but
indistinguishable. A surviving Tourist operative named Leticia Jones is just
a sexy killer of the old school. But where Steinhauers fiction succeeds
masterfully is in the portrayal of one reality from different, deceptive
angles, transferring his characters indecision and uncertainty to the
page. The plot repeatedly shunts back and forth in chronology and perspective.
Everyone lies, for different reasons. The picture is always opaque.

Real espionage is actually like this. Winston Churchill, a keen aficionado
of wartime deception, described the spying game as tangle within tangle,
plot and counterplot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent,
false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing
party . . . interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible
and yet true. Spying is itself a form of fiction, the creating of invented
worlds, which perhaps explains why so many of the best spy novelists were
once in the intelligence business: W. Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Graham
Greene and le Carré himself.

I dont know if Steinhauer was ever a spy  he writes with the
sort of detailed relish that suggests personal experience  but he certainly
has the right name for it. Gustav Steinhauer was Kaiser Wilhelms spy
chief during World War I. He established an elaborate German espionage network
in Britain and even toured the country, in disguise, the month before war
broke out. For reasons that have never been fully explained, the British
security service, M.I.5, knew where he was, but didnt arrest him. He
may have been a double agent. Perhaps Olen Steinhauer is related to Gustav
Steinhauer. Someone should ask him. But I doubt youd get a straight
answer.

Ben Macintyres latest book, Double Cross: The True Story of the
D-Day Spies, will be published in July.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 1, 2012, on page BR9
of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Pawns Move.